This is America's first YouTube election. Since the Orwellian anti-Hillary advert Vote Different appeared online in March 2007, the site has become a vibrant new political battleground where candidates' images are cheerfully reshaped via spoofs, sketches and songs. Ideas, not campaign dollars, are the crucial currency.

One major downside to this innovation, if you're a presidential candidate: your every gaffe will be recorded, remixed and rewatched for months to come. Though there is a big upside: you don't have to generate your own campaign songs any more.

In past decades, a US election song was the job of the candidate's team, producing such gems as Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge, Buckle Down With Nixon and, lest we forget, Get on a Raft With Taft. But this year the official songs are as unloved and irrelevant as Fred Thompson.

All the important musical action is on YouTube, where self-penned ditties meet recontextualised oldies, and celebrity endorsements encounter amateur spoofs. Much of this is down to Obama, who has been granted his own jokey genre: Barack'n'roll. But YouTube is also good for providing perspective. Flattering or not, even the most high-profile video will be several million views less popular than shaky home movie footage of a baby laughing.

The song that sparked the Barack'n'roll trend last June also made an internet celebrity of Obama Girl, aka 25-year-old actor Amber Lee Ettinger, aka E!'s number one hottest woman on the internet. Although advertising executive Ben Relles wrote it, Kevin Arbouet and Larry Strong directed it and Leah Kauffman sang it. It works for three reasons: a) it's a fiendishly catchy R&B tune; b) it's genuinely funny; and c) Ettinger is a grandmaster at the art of tossing her hair around while wearing tiny shorts.

Obama, the spoilsport, complained that it upset his daughters and said: "You do wish people would think about what impact their actions have on kids and families." Undeterred, Ettinger and co released several follow-ups, the latest of which urges Hillary to drop out. Erstwhile rival Giuliani Girl remains MIA.

Perhaps to atone for visiting upon an unsuspecting world the weapon of mass irritation that was My Humps, chief Black Eyed Pea Will.i.am enlists a crew of celebrity Barack-backers (including Scarlett Johansson, John Legend and Michael from Lost) to trill along to Obama's famous New Hampshire speech in January. Backed only by some sober acoustic strumming, its trump card is restraint.

Obama, with his rhythmic cadences and stirring phrasemaking, is the frontman and everyone else his backing singers, halfway between a gospel choir and hip-hop hypemen. But it's hard not to compare Jesse Dylan's clip, with its tasteful black and white photography, plain backgrounds and John Legend's excellent cardigan, with a Gap advert. Yes, we can have tasteful, affordable knitwear. Since its February release, it has inspired a more self-congratulatory follow-up, We Are the Ones, and two McCain-bashing spoofs, john.he.is and No, You Can't. Definitely not to be confused with the Pointer Sisters' 1973 hit Yes We Can Can.

Never mind rhetoric, charm and policy commitments - what the Obama campaign needs is the adorability factor. Aged six, nine and 11, the Rockabelles come across like the Pipettes would if they had been blasted with a shrinking ray, singing peppy Clapping Song-style chants and stopping at nothing in their quest for words that rhyme with Obama. A shame they are too young to vote.

A shame, also, that the Rockabelles have yet to tackle songwriter Jim Allyn's other political composition, The Colors: "As the smoke chokes out the sun along the cratered road / Another IED explodes." Come on, that would be the most adorable song about the occupation of Iraq ever.

Rappers are traditionally more inclined to bury politicians than praise them but, 24 years after Jesse Jackson's White House bid inspired Melle Mel to record Jesse, Obama is the first candidate to truly rock the hip-hop vote.

After all the hip-hop and R&B, at last there is one for the veteran liberals who still cherish their McGovern 72 badges (not many of them, judging by the tally of YouTube views). With his harmonica, gospel backing vocals and wry, conversational, Dylanesque voice, Lewis taps into 60s protest song nostalgia. He takes his lyrics, and title, from Obama's victory speech in Wisconsin in February: "This is what change looks like when it happens from the bottom up." The traditional DIY montage of campaign clips and stills ends on a strangely unsettling Photoshop melding of Obama and Uncle Sam.

Sample lyric: "Now we've done what the cynics said we couldn't do / In lines that stretch for blocks around schools and churches and small towns and big cities / Our time for change has come"

YouTube views: 718

Hillary Clinton

Taryn Southern - Hott 4 Hill

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It was surely a bad omen when the first specially composed pro-Hillary tune to get attention was a tongue-in-cheek, sapphic response to Obama Girl. Former American Idol contestant Taryn Southern plays a sexy school teacher in why-Miss-Jones-you're-beautiful spectacles professing her love for Clinton: "I know you're not gay but I'm hoping for bi." (For the benefit of irony-impervious viewers, Southern informed CNN that she was, in fact, straight.) Finally, Hillary's face is Photoshopped on to Mount Rushmore, in a move sure to alienate hardcore Thomas Jefferson fans.

Sample lyric: "Hillary I like your hair / The pant suits you wear / And the shape of your derriere"

Chosen in June 2007 after a month-long public vote (no superdelegates required), Clinton's official campaign song isn't a patch on Bill's boomer-friendly 1992 anthem, Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop. This trite Céline Dion number was previously used to advertise Air Canada. Needless to say, it rhymes fly, high and sky.

However, nobody flies high in the sky in the video, which resembles the world's most tedious tour movie. See Hillary speak in Iowa! See Hillary shake hands in North Carolina! Check watch. Make tea. See Hillary walk through the snow somewhere! Fall asleep on keyboard.

Sample lyric: "You and I were meant to fly / Higher than the clouds we'll sail across the sky"

"Your last name and our band name just happen to be the same / So I bet we hear the same jokes every day." Forming in Montana at the end of one Clinton administration, John Mayeresque MOR band the Clintons know a good PR opportunity when they see one, hence this deadpan love song, which could almost pass as sincere, as the band sombrely pace around in the snow and pull sensitive faces. Rumours that they might change their name to the Obamas in the coming weeks remain unconfirmed.

Scarcely recovered from its infamous YouTube mauling by a Bank of America employee who changed the lyrics to celebrate a merger with MBNA, U2's enduring anthem (via Mary J Blige) has now been dragooned by Hillary supporters. Although the song is often misunderstood, Bono's gloss on the lyric ("It's not saying we even want to get along, but that we have to get along together in this world if it is to survive. It's a reminder that we have no choice") is surprisingly appropriate to Hillary's message of grim, nuts-and-bolts pragmatism.

The video operates a buy-one-patriotic-image-get-one-free policy: Iwo Jima, 9/11, soldiers, sharecroppers, disabled veterans, Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, etc. A montage of past female political leaders culminates in the somewhat apologetic slogan: "If not now, when?" Which is only marginally better than: "Hillary -- better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick."

Sample lyric: "We're one but we're not the same / Well we hurt each other and we do it again"

YouTube views: 5,899

John McCain

The McCain Girls - Raining McCain

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The Eurythmics ordered the removal of the McCain Girls' Here Comes McCain Again, so the Weather Girls must be either Republicans or not fussy. Having endured covers by RuPaul and Geri Halliwell, their 1982 camp anthem It's Raining Men dies screaming in the hands of three tone-deaf women who sing with the misguided gusto of a closing-time karaoke crowd - the extended cry of "McCaaaaaiiiin" sounds like someone throttling an ostrich.

Among the video's myriad delights: employment of umbrellas that undoes all Rihanna's good work, fist-chewingly inappropriate clips of GIs yomping through the long grass in Vietnam, and multiple John McCains falling from the sky like a biblical plague. After initial responses were less than glowing, one McCain Girl posted a pithy filmed response, informing critics that "no one gives a crap about half-point-eight of what the fuck you have to say". John McCain, meet your future press secretary.

Sample lyric: "I'm gonna go out and let myself get absolutely John McCain"

The vast majority of McCain-related videos are either jokes or attacks - most, in fact, riff on his gaffe of singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of Barbara Ann - so you have to dig around for a sincere endorsement. Cue Maryland lawyer Judd Kessler, who sits at his piano to perform a self-penned rallying cry with all the pulse-pounding vigour of a rainy Wednesday afternoon in a Nebraska rest home.

This may be a true reflection of McCain's fanbase, but not one that the 71-year-old senator is likely to embrace. Seemingly a decent cove, Kessler is frank about his limitations, saying: "As I do this I want you to imagine someone with a real voice singing it." If you also imagine a different tune and different words, it starts to sound really good.

Sample lyric: "We know you fought and suffered / Not to have a hero's day / But because you loved America / And cherished freedom's flame"

YouTube views: 2,140

Ron Paul

King Solomon & Roy Shivers - Ron Paul for the Long Haul

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A 72-year-old congressman may be the most unlikely hip-hop hero since Phil Collins, but Ron Paul's libertarian, non-interventionist views strike a chord with rap's conspiracy-theorist wing, where no accusation is too outlandish to set to a beat.

King Solomon and Roy Shivers' effort is a slick affair based around a snaking jazz trumpet riff, but the lyrics are barking: Giuliani is a puppet of the Illuminati, Clinton a tool of the Bilderberg group, and George Bush, perhaps more likely, "a cokehead retard".

Of course, they all want to bomb Iran at the behest of oil companies and those mysterious global -bankers. Bolstering mushroom cloud footage with other apocalyptic imagery, the video seems to make the bold claim that Paul is capable of preventing not just nuclear armageddon but also asteroid collisions.

Sample lyric: "Lady Clinton wanna manage a police state / Pan-American she bring death like cheesesteak"